March 2009

March 31, 2009

News comes out of India’s publishing world that book
advances there have gone through the roof. Strangely, with two books behind me
and three more coming up I seem to have been left completely untouched by this
boom. To be fair, my Dalai Lama biography has done very well worldwide but the
kind of figures that are being bandied about in India these days are quite
remarkable.

Well known historian Ramchandra Guha has just signed a seven-book
deal with Penguin India for 9.7 million rupees. This comes to a little over 1.3
million rupees per book or about $27,714
apiece. When you look at it that way it is not a huge figure. Nevertheless
Indian publishing has come a long way from publishers not just refusing to pay
any advance but even dithering on and fudging to pay royalties.

According to IANS, Penguin had paid Rs.5.5 million (over
$120,000) for Amitav Ghosh's "Ibis" trilogy - of which "Sea of
Poppies" was the first book. Infosys boss Nandan Nilekani fetched Rs.2.5
million (about $52,000) for "Imagining India" and Arvind Adiga raked
in Rs.1.3 million ($28,000) for "White Tiger". (Please note that the
figures have been roughly adjusted to reflect the rupee-dollar exchange rate of
the day.) As major advances in the US market go for big books, these are
embarrassingly small figures. It is excessive to use the term “raking in” to
describe the advances. However, when you consider in the narrow context of
Indian publishing, which also used to mean authors paying publishers, it is
quite impressive. It is particularly big in rupees because publishers have to
at least earn back the advance.

My general understanding is that Indian publishers have
begun to take some risk, although many still take the safe and somewhat dubious
route of managing advance orders through celebrity authors’ personal network
and contacts. I am sure this practice does exist in the US as well.

As a career-long hack I am happy to see writers finally getting
their due. Even today writing is considered an incidental talent. Most authors
who get buttonholed by readers have encountered this terrible expression, “I am
also a writer.” It is as if serious writing is something you do between shaving
and combing your hair in the morning. I have always maintained that unless one
has produced at least 10 books, one has no business being called a writer. Just
as (cliché alert) one swallow does not a summer make, one book does not a
writer make.

Speaking of the body of work, my dear friend and well known
Marathi writer and satirist Shireesh Kanekar has just released his 34th
book. Rather than organizing a glitzy release function (glitzy in middle class
Marathi parlance means a community hall) he chose to do it at a popular public
square at Shivaji Park in the Dadar area of Mumbai. “Katta” as the place is
called saw Shireesh’s many friends get together in a completely informal
ceremony peppered with profanities and deliberately subpar humor. My sources tell me Shireesh got hundreds of rupees in advance.

March 30, 2009

India’s political parties are set to spend a total of a
billion plus dollars on the parliamentary elections, scheduled to start on
April 16. That number might seem staggering in absolute terms but compared to
the US presidential election it is quite modest.

The two main parties, the Congress Party and the Bharatiya
Janata Party, could spend nearly $400 million apiece. There are over 20 other
parties which are expected to spend at least another $200 million, according to
various estimates. The reason why this number is modest compared to what one
witnessed in the US is because the expenditure in India covers thousands of
candidates contesting for seats in the country’s parliament. According to the
Federal Election Commission Barack Obama raised $532,946,511 and spent $513,557,218,
while his main rival John McCain raised $379,006,485 and spent $346,666,422. In
contrast, going by the unofficial estimates, each parliamentary candidate (if
you take the exact number of parliamentary seats at 543) will spend less than two
million dollars or Rs 100 million. This is an average. It is more than likely
that some star candidates will spend several times that amount.

The election law imposes a ceiling of Rs 2.5 million
($50,000) per parliamentary candidate, a laughably unrealistic limit which even
the poorest of aspirants breach without any qualms. Unlike in the U.S. where
election donations are given in checks and fairly stringently accounted for, in
India it is predominantly suitcases full of cash. During my many years of
covering parliamentary elections I was witness to massive cash transactions. It
is a violation everyone, including the Election Commission, is well aware of
but barely does anything about. Reforming campaign finance is a permanent
subject of discussion but is never really resolved.

March 29, 2009

Going by the frenzied operation run by a China-based cyber
spy network, there is more to hack on the Dalai Lama’s computers than just
compassion.

A 10-month research carried by the Information Warfare
Monitor (IWM) of Toronto, Canada at the instance of the Tibetan exile community
the Chinese hackers have gained considerable access to their computers.

"We have been told by the researchers that the Chinese
hackers have gained access to our computers systems all over the world, and
taken sensitive documents from the office of His Holiness (the Dalai
Lama)," Toronto-based Tibetan student leader Bhutila Karpoche told Gurmukh
Singh of IANS.

The cyber spy network also hacked into several Indian
embassies’ computers worldwide, according to the report. It is not clear what
they found or stole from those. It could not have been just visa forms though.

I suspect more than trying to digitally burglarize the Dalai
Lama’s computers for specifics, the purpose appears to be to let the Tibetans
know that they are not safe. It is hard to imagine what sensitive information
China or this spy network can get out of the computers that they do not already
know. Advance information such as email exchanges between the Dalai Lama’s
office and the rest of the world can be obviously very useful in preempting any
moves that Beijing fears but other than that I am not sure what is to be
gained.

The primary purpose appears to be to keep them anxious and
in the process disrupt their cause. Whatever be the motivation it is yet
another example of the permanent Chinese paranoia about an avowedly peaceful
monk. If the Chinese could bar my personal as well news websites, both rather
limited in their reach, influence and appeal, I am not surprised that they
would go to great lengths to checkmate the Dalai Lama, whom once described as a
beast.

“…I'm not interested in the audience finding me likable. Gandhi is
extremely un-likable. A fucking stubborn bugger…” Sir Ben Kingsley says in an interview
with The Guardian. Out of context this comment can be quite startling. The problem is when read in context it does not particularly
become less startling even though the stubborn part is absolutely accurate. Fucking and bugger? Not so much.

Here is the context.

“Kingsley is promoting
a new movie, Fifty
Dead Men Walking, in which he plays a British Special Branch officer in
1980s Belfast. The film is based on the book of the same name by Martin
McGartland, a former IRA informer. McGartland is played with wide-boy aplomb by
Jim Sturgess; Kingsley is his handler, Fergus, a reticent Lancashireman who, in
the absence of his own son, to whom he no longer talks, comes to feel
unexpectedly paternal about his young, paid sneak. On paper, this sounds
suspiciously sentimental; on screen, it is anything but. The film is very
violent, with several long torture scenes. When I watched it, I spent a lot of
time with my eyes closed. And then there is Kingsley, who turns in a
performance so stubbornly low-key that he renders Fergus almost invisible - an
incredibly brave thing for an actor to do. "Yes, invisible," says
Kingsley, solemnly. "My wife said that. 'Baba!' she said. 'You've made him
invisible.' But that is what he is; that is what he has to be." Baba? Oh
dear. But anyway... Did it feel courageous, making Fergus so very quiet? The
risk is that one's work might not be noticed. He says not. "What I despise
is when I read scripts, and it says: 'Enter Derek' and then in brackets: 'You
gotta love this guy.' I'm not interested in the audience finding me likable.
Gandhi is extremely un-likable. A fucking stubborn bugger. David Kapesh [his
character, a philandering academic, in Elegy, from the novel by Philip Roth],
he won't suffer fools. I want my character to be seen, understood, not
loved." Still, a lot of actors - most, probably - long to be loved; that's
why they became actors in the first place. "You may be right. But I don't
want having to love me getting in the way of my story."

March 28, 2009

Not that I mean to beat up on Thomas Friedman (and not that
I have nearly the standing for anyone to really care) but it is both troubling
and amusing to hear the New York Times columnist slobbering over Infosys boss Nandan
Nilekani. Their lovefest continued
relentlessly on the Charlie Rose Show on March 26.

Towards the end of the interview Friedman had to slip this in
yet again: “Charlie, people should know that Nandan has been called the Bill
Gates of India. I call him the Steve Jobs of Bangalore.” Let’s forget for a
second what Messers Gates and Jobs might think of this hybrid but can anyone,
who can seriously analyze individual accomplishments, equate Gates and Jobs with
Nilekani? This is not to belittle Nilekani’s success which is considerable by
any measure. However, no matter how generous you are in your praise it is excessive
to put Nilekani is the same league as Gates and Jobs.

This brings me back to my earlier point in my earlier post
about how Western commentators and observers interfacing with world class Indians
tend to be gushing about them. No one expects Friedman or Jon Stewart to
compulsively criticize or cut to size others. But there is a theme that runs
through all such interactions between the Western intelligentsia and its Indian
counterpart. I hope it is not a case of the bar in their private mind to judge those from outside America being so low that anyone reasonably intelligent jumps over it.

March 27, 2009

Hardee's commercial featuring Padma Lakshmi is so self-consciously suggestive that it loses its impact. Licking her slender fingers and erect thumb, sticking her tongue out to lure a piece of bacon into her mouth and pulling her dress up even while generously displaying her cleavage is also so obvious that it almost seems boring. That food and erotica have a primordial bond is well known but in this commercial it all looks so contrived. But then the world is better off with Padma Lakshmi biting into a juicy burger rather than suicide bombers killing scores in Pakistan.

Quite predictably, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto is
being positioned by her handlers as a culturally neutral actress rather than an
Indian one with international appeal. "Freida can't be compared to
Aishwarya (Rai), because we're not pitching her as an Indian girl in
international films. Freida is a true global face," Anirban Das, CEO of
her management company, was quoted as saying by the Daily Telegraph.

The Telegraph’s Dean Nelson reports that Pinto is now the
highest paid Indian actress internationally at two million pounds or a little
over three million dollars. That fee is supposedly higher than Rai, widely
regarded as the biggest export from Hindi movies to Hollywood.

It makes sense to project Pinto, an actress of fairly modest
talents, as culturally neutral rather than Indian. That can expand the range of
her international assignment. While she has expressed a willingness to work in
Hindi movies, so far Hindi filmmakers do not seem to be falling over each other
to cast her. Hindi cinema’s predispositions toward a certain kind of female
form are well known. It is true that in
recent years the definition of female beauty has become far more eclectic than
ever before. However, mainstream movies still gravitate around fair-skinned,
busty and obviously well defined women. Pinto does not meet those standards.
Although the fabled size zero has definitely become a benchmark for many young
actresses, the median size of Hindi cinema heroines is still bigger.

It is possible that Pinto might yet choose to work with some
of the more compelling names in India. However, once you get used to a price
tag of three million dollars, which is really quite low by Hollywood standards,
it is hard to work at much lower rupee prices that she is bound to be offered.
Her current fee converts to about Rs. 150 million, a figure still unreachable
for most stars, both male and female, in India. Why would she compromise both
on money and exposure by accepting Hindi assignments?

She has tasted blood with Slumdog’s success and would like
to make as much out of the next ten years of her prime career as she can (She
is 24). Most female stars begin to wane in their mid-30s unless you are a Meryl
Streep, who is 59, or Kate Winslet, who is 33. Whatever little we have seen so
far of Pinto, is nowhere close to either.

Admittedly this is not a South Asian subject but in so much as the idiosyncrasies of the "leader of the free world" affect everyone I think this picture is very important. You may consider it as my exclusive.

March 26, 2009

Over 80 children have gone missing in the last five months
since October in Ghaziabad district of India’s Uttar Pradesh state in an
apparent crime spree reminiscent of the Nithari abduction, rape and murder of
19 women and children in 2006. S P Singh of the wire service IANS reports, “Tied
with a rope, four-year-old Rohit was being carried in a gunny bag on a
cycle-rickshaw by his kidnapper. The child regained consciousness and the
abductor panicked and fled the scene. Rohit was rescued. But over 80 other
children missing from Ghaziabad district of Uttar Pradesh since October have
not been so lucky.”

While at one level this is indicative of the rising lawlessness
in many parts of India, at another level it is symptomatic of a deeper malaise.
I am speculating here since I have no official basis to go by. How does one
explain what appears to be a very systematic abduction of children other than
wondering about its overarching motive? Are these children being abducted to
support a thriving illegal organ trade? Organ smugglers have been active
throughout India and are known to prey on sections of society which do not have
a strong political and economic voice.Or are these children part of the equally dehumanizing flesh trade?

Any child abduction is a terrible crime but it acquires a wholly
macabre dimension when scores of them get kidnapped and are either not found or
found maimed and brutalized. While the Nithari killings were explained as a
case of necrophilia and necrophagia, it is hard to comprehend what the latest
kidnappings are all about. The sheer number would suggest profit as a motive
but that means presuming that they are all carried out by a group of people
working together.

Ghaziabad district sits on the immediate west of the capital
city of New Delhi. Its location next to the national capital, whose inhabitants
consider it to be one of the great power centers of the world, makes the
kidnappings even more galling.